I mentioned Terrell Owens in my last round of CEVO predictions. Apparently, you only have to say his name once to summon his spirit (suck it, Beetlejuice), because an Owens-ish story broke on the GotFrag forums. The thread was about Ryan “phamtast1k” Pham, a CAL-I/CEVO-P player in both Counter-Strike 1.6 and Counter-Strike Source. To preserve your sanity I’m going to summarize it here – eight pages of GotFrag thread are too much for any mere mortal to handle. If you don’t value your sanity, dig in!
Basically, the creator accused Pham of having multiple forum accounts on GotFrag. That’s fine, a lot of pros probably do that so they can post without being hassled or recognized. The problem was how he decided to use the accounts – to boast about his own statistics and say things like “pham > exodus.” There were multiple posts where he bashed his current and former teammates, which is completely unacceptable. At least when Owens bashes his teammates, everybody knows who is doing it.
In the next seven pages there were a lot of posts from other professional players, but nothing from Pham. (I think he didn’t post, anyway. Lord only knows how many forum accounts he actually has. He could be some kind of hoarder. Other people live with seventy cats, maybe he has seventy accounts. Personally, I think cats would be the way to go. Less shit.) Most of the reactions were what you’d expect: surprise, disbelief, a couple half-hearted attempts at giving him the benefit of the doubt. There was one post claiming that the whole thing was a joke, but nobody backed that up. The players seemed genuinely surprised and angered, so I doubt it was a prank.
A lot of his former teammates said they felt backstabbed, and I understand that. If Pham only built himself up, he could have come onto the forums or released a statement apologizing for his actions and that would have gone a long way towards rehabilitating his image. Instead he disparaged former teammates and organizations. That’s a much harder pill to swallow. One of the best things about team sports is the camaraderie. The highs are higher and the lows are less painful. For lack of a better word, teammates are your nakama. They’re friends and ingame family. Going behind their backs is the antithesis to the foundation of a team: trust. No man is more important than the squad, and a problem should either be significant enough to confront them or trivial enough to keep your mouth shut.
The anger I can understand, but I don’t think we should be surprised something like this happened. (His former teammates seemed to know what was going on. A few of them didn’t seem to think very highly of his teamwork skills. Judging from their posts, if this was Office Space, Pham would have been the printer.) One thing all professional players have in common is confidence in their abilities. This holds true in the NBA, the NFL or the NJJA (National Jumping Jack Association … okay I made that one up). It’s a very thin line between confidence and arrogance; believing in your abilities and believing you’re better than everybody else. The only line crossed more is the USA/Mexico border. Does this excuse or justify what Pham did? Of course not. But given the nature of using aliases on the forums and the confidence necessary to be a professional gamer, I don’t think we should be shocked and appalled when somebody crosses the line. Disappointed, sure. Surprised, not so much
While this particular problem hopefully won’t happen too often, the things that cause it are always just beneath the surface. Players are always looking out for #1 (as opposed to looking out for #2, which only happens to people with a fear of poop). From an organization’s perspective it’s a trade-off. If the goal is winning at all costs, sometimes the arrogance that comes along with a player is an unavoidable evil. When those people are brought onto a team, chemistry and ego problems shouldn’t be a surprise. You roll the dice and eventually you’re going to end up with snake-eyes. That’s just the way it is.
